Search Engine Optimization

Our SEO Process

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a highly technical process, but for online merchants it's also a critical business process. That's why we take the time to learn about your goals, products, the competition, and your marketplace.

First, we'll review the site structure and search engine rankings for both your website (if any) and those of your competitors. This helps define your 'Before' and 'After' benchmarks for search engine optimization.

Keyword research is next - identifying the words or phrases that your audience is likely to enter into search engines in order to find your products. This research can yield keyword suggestions that can be one of the most beneficial aspects of SEO, with high returns on investment (ROI).

Keyword research consists of three primary activities:

Discovery

We'll guide you to select the most relevant keywords for your website. We'll use the 'root' keywords to generate related single keywords, keyword combinations, and variations like singular, plurals and synonyms.

We'll then compare these keyword suggestions to those in current use by your audience. The goal is to identify the most widely-used search keywords so we can focus on the 'vital few' for your website.

ROI analysis

Popular keywords aren't always the most valuable. Generic keywords can be widely used while also delivering mediocre conversion rates. We'll perform a statistical analysis that highlights relevant keywords with the highest ROI.

Competitive Analysis

This phase will show you the competitive landscape for any given search term. Competitive factors include how diligent sites are to optimization issues, how many relevant inbound links they have received.

We also give you an Initial Positioning Report that highlights your competitors' strengths & weaknesses, along with a summary of where you and the competition are currently positioned in the major search engines and directories.

Site Optimization

Optimizing your site will typically take 5-10 business days, depending on your goals, the complexity of your site, and the competitive landscape.

Note: Optimizing your site will not affect the way your pages look in any way. The necessary changes include new URLs (path names) for selected pages as well as including a list of recommended words in your existing page content. We'll give you files summarizing all these changes.

The Site Optimization Process consists of:

On-Page Site Optimization

Here we work on a page-by-page basis to optimize your content. We identify the page(s) needing modification and give you the optimized content you need for higher rankings. All our methods follow Best Practices for SEO and are spam-free. We adjust such factors as Title & Meta Tags, Creating/Reframing, Internal Site Links, Keyword-rich Content, and URL framing. When we're done, your site can definitely be considered search engine-friendly.

Search Engine Markup Semantic Analysis Here we analyze the source code of your website and correct anything that could make a search engine hesitate or stumble. This analysis also checks the Meta Tags, Titles, Keyword Density and Content on all pages.

Off-Page Site Optimization

Once On-Page Optimization is complete, we'll reload the website to see if further modifications are needed. When everything's perfect, we'll upload the optimized content (with compiled tags) to your server.

Your website is now ready for the major Search Engines and Directories.

Link Building

Boosting Page Rank is the next priority for your optimized site. When all other factors are equal, Search Engines will always favor the page with a higher Page Rank.

Page Rank is essentially 'link popularity.' It's a reflection of how many other websites contain links pointed at your site. (You may also hear these called 'inbound links' or 'non-reciprocal links.'

Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, AltaVista and others place great importance on incoming links. A large number of high-quality incoming links can help your website beat the competition in the search engine rankings.

Not all links are created equal. Search engines evaluate the incoming links to determine the 'quality' of the link. They use such factors as the Page Rank of the linking page, the total outgoing links on the linking page, the relevance of the linking website to your industry, the relevance of the specific linking page, the use of keywords in anchor text, etc.